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Brazil uprising points to rise of leaderless networks

By Debora MacKenzie

A call to arms

(Image: Leo Correa/Redux/Eyevine)

BRAZILIANS are calling the protests sweeping through their country the Salad Uprising after police began arresting people carrying vinegar as a remedy for tear gas. The name could be more apt than protesters realise&colon; uprisings of this sort could also have food links. But they spread like a disease.

Brazil’s uprising came “totally out of the blue”, says Marcus de Aguiar at the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil. “We never had anything like this before.” It began when police responded violently to protests over a 6 per cent hike in bus fares in São Paulo. But the uprising continued even after the fare increase was rescinded.

That may not be surprising. Dan Braha at the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says civil unrest spreads like other spatial phenomena such as epidemics and forest fires&colon; different factors control susceptibility, resistance, and rates of outbreak and transmission.

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Braha’s modelling studies of unrest over the past century in 170 countries show how long-standing social stresses leave a society susceptible to the spread of unrest once it is sparked off. The initial focus may be an otherwise unrelated event&colon; bus fare increases in Brazil; redevelopment of a park in Turkey; heavy-handed policing in Sweden; the suicide of a Tunisian street vendor in the 2011 Arab Spring.

Brazil’s social stresses are clear, say the protesters. Schools, hospitals – and bus services – are suffering as public funds are lavished on the preparations for next year’s soccer World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Resentments deepen as economic inequality persists, despite an economic boom that has lifted 20 per cent of the population out of poverty in the past decade, says Edmar Bacha, an economist who helped end Brazil’s chronic inflation in the 1990s.

In fact, most protestors worldwide are not the grindingly poor, but the newly prosperous, says Martin Scheffer of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. As inflation begins to surge again, these people fear falling back into poverty. This suggests societies emerging from poverty could be unstable&colon; China take note.

In fact, most protestors worldwide are not the grindingly poor, but the newly prosperous

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of NECSI, has found that when a global food price index tops a threshold value, clusters of riots occur. It has been hovering around this value for some time, he warns – more price spikes may mean more riots.

Meanwhile, social media boost a protest’s transmission rate through susceptible societies. A Facebook page connected to Brazil’s protests, says Braha, went from thousands of members to hundreds of thousands overnight. Also a factor here, says Scheffer, are unemployed young people – the equivalent of an epidemic’s carriers. In December last year a combination of restless youths and high food prices led to rioting in Argentina.

But these factors alone do not cause the outbreak, says Bar-Yam. He thinks recent cases of unrest relate to a general evolution within our societies away from hierarchies and towards leaderless networks. Self-organisation within these networks becomes contagious “as we develop a better understanding of collective action”, he says. In time this could spread beyond uprisings.